Terence McKenna Quotes

On the other side of the spirit veil, I spend more than a little bit of time researching the hallucinogens. I personally believe ayahuasca is also the greatest natural healing agent, period.

The planet is alive, and it's a woman.

I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness.

I don't think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There's very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There's an elegant quality to the wild mind.

Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.

The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.

It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that!

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.

Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.

If I find a green meadow splashed with daisies and sit down beside a clear-running brook, I have found medicine. It soothes my hurts as well as when I sat in my mother's lap in infancy, because the Earth really is my mother, and the green meadow is her lap.

What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.

The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.

It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature.

Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.

We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.

It’s hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid.

I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.

We are literally children of the earth, and removed from her our spirits wither or run to various forms of insanity. Unless we can refresh ourselves at least by intermittent contact with nature, we grow awry.

Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.

It is difficult to distinguish where the feminine ends and nature begins.

Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly.

The earth is not just our environment. The earth is our mother.